Bioinspired Radiative Cooling Structure with Randomly Stacked Fibers for Efficient All-Day Passive Cooling
Zhangbin Yang, Jun Zhang
Abstract
Without the help of compression-based cooling systems, natural creatures have to make use of other things to decrease their body temperature to survive under thermally harsh conditions. This work finds that the silkworm cocoon of Bombyx mori protects pupae from the rapid temperature fluctuations via the randomly stacked silk fibers, which possess high solar reflectance and thermal emittance for thermal regulation. Inspired by this microstructure, the melt-blown polypropylene (MB-PP) with randomly stacked fibers is fabricated by a large-scale melt-blown fabrication method. For enhancing the thermal emittance of MB-PP, the surface-modified MB-PP (SMB-PP) is obtained by constructing the poly(dimethylsiloxane) film on the MB-PP. As the reason for its high solar reflectance (∼95%) and thermal emittance (∼0.82), the SMB-PP displays subambient temperature drops of 4 °C in the daytime and 5 °C in the nighttime, respectively. Moreover, building energy simulation indicates that the SMB-PP could save ∼132 GJ (∼58.1% of the baseline energy consumption) for 1 year in the contiguous United States. Overall, the bioinspired structures offer a novel pathway out of cooling buildings, showing great promising application prospects in zero-energy buildings.